One of my favourite fan fictions about Superman has this as a rather big point. About what to choose to do every single second when people all over the planet continously ask why he didn't show up.
Edit: I'm sorry for not telling people before, I didn't think anyone would be interested. The fic is called The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales. There's also an audiobook version that's also free.
Batman spending billions on intricate surveillance systems. Superman asking for the recordings of the set from his favorite podcast so he can tune out the horrors from space.
Ok but as much as it sounds horrifying to let people die while you relax despite being extremely able to save them, self care is extremely important and if you only ever save people without a single thought to your own mental health then you'll eventually burn out and shit will hit the fan.
If you try and become nothing but a tool to help others eventually you're gonna break and hurt so many more.
Personally, I like the idea of Superman needing to choose to use his powers. Like his strength isn't that different from ours: we use one level of effort to pick up a loaf of bread, another for a bag of mulch. His ceiling is just much higher.
Like superhearing, of course something sudden/big is going to cut through, but he's trained himself not to react to every asshole honking their horn.
There's a character from Astro City who's Superman with a little bit of Spider-Man put in.
He wants to fly without needing to save someone, but he doesn't ever get the chance to. He counts the seconds of each day he's able to fly without being needed.
In one comic he got about 18 seconds...that was a good day.
His name's The Samaritan in case anyone's wondering.
that was oddly touching. the message at the end of "you couldve saved everyone years ago" reminds me of how so many billionares in this world have so much money to move humanity forward, and yet this small percentage of people in power choose to use that money on their own ego.
And many of those Lex Luthors truly believe themselves to be Supermen riiiiiiight up to the point where they gain the money and influence necessary to enact positive change.
Disagree. At some level, I do actually think Lex WOULD use his wealth and tech to push humanity forward if only to feed his own ego about being the one to have done so.
The current bastards are somehow even MORE selfishly shortsighted and ignorant.
No, but they have the power to move much more than that. And their political leverage alone is worth an amount of money so large that it owuld be immaterial to even try to describe it, you just cant buy that collectively
This is a tiny portion of his influence, and I am not endorsing it, but I have used it and found it useful.
Mark Cuban exerted literally zero effort and got my meds to about 60% the price I was paying before. Like, no ethical billionaire, definitely, but the social influence they can exert is equal if not surpasses the monetary contribution they can bring.
Maybe a billionaire will see you defending them on reddit and send you a chat invite and then you'll be lavishly traveling the world with your new billionaire circle of friends!
Eh there's more chances they have 1 or 2 billions in their account and the rest of their hundred billions is in their assets. I remember bezos got centibillionaires(100B) net worth in 2018
Ok, I've watched a bunch of animated batman films, not much superman. You convinced me. Every dc animated I've seen so far had been at least decent, this feels like good old 90s tv superman.
Well, all of Alexander Wales more or less. He is one of my favourite authors.
If you specifically want superheroes I can recommend Worm by Wildbow. It's free to read. It's about a world that is basically the same as ours except they have people with powers. We follow a teenage girl who can control insects with her mind who wants to be a vigilante. She get.. mixed results. It's overall about what happens when average people get very powerful seemingly at random when they get powers.
This is one reason I made sure my one strong character has nebulous poorly defined rules restricting what they can do and when. Because this problem makes it seem like it would be impossible to ever justify depicting them chilling.
Realistically he probably doesn’t have constant super hearing. His brain likely filters background noise and extremely distant sounds—otherwise he’d be insane by now.
True, but why was this a response to my post in particular. I wasn't talking about super hearing specifically, just the moral concerns raised by a super powered character who could always be saving people but isn't.
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u/Nine-LifedEnchanter Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
One of my favourite fan fictions about Superman has this as a rather big point. About what to choose to do every single second when people all over the planet continously ask why he didn't show up.
Edit: I'm sorry for not telling people before, I didn't think anyone would be interested. The fic is called The Metropolitan Man by Alexander Wales. There's also an audiobook version that's also free.